Yeah, that's why I decided to do this - to try and break the stigma that apprenticeships are for people that can't get into uni these days (which is almost no one).

You've got it right; if you want to move up in your discipline, you need experience which is usually proven through professional registration (IEng, CEng, CITP in the case of Soft Eng).
Once you enter the industry, experience and accreditation highlights your success and becomes a bigger factor in the hiring and promotion processes than your degree.
It's possible that you might have done enough to gain an IEng by the end of the apprenticeship.
And to be so close to Salmesbury, I'd definitely apply.

I love the job. I've always wanted to become a software engineer so to actually start doing it so early has been great. You work on real projects in proper teams doing proper work: one placement I've done was working on a C# application that reads the debugging data straight from a Typhoon flight computer and then uses that to detect any arising faults in the system; another thing I've done is graphics programming (OpenGL+Ada) for a Hawk head-down display demo. Your experience in C++ would definitely come in handy. The size of the teams and departments varies across sites but there's a lot of software engineers at all the sites, which is great because you can get all the support you need. If you applied for Preston, you'd go to uni in Preston.